A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [93]
I had closed the shop at twelve. I got back just after three. I hadn’t had any lunch. That would have delayed me further, and Friday was a big day for trade. I found the shop closed. Metty hadn’t opened up at one, as I had expected him to. Barely an hour of trade remained, and many of the retailers from the outlying villages would have done their shopping and started back on the long journey home by dugout or truck. The last pickup vans in the square, which left when they had a load, were more or less loaded.
I had my first alarm about myself, the beginning of the decay of the man I had known myself to be. I had visions of beggary and decrepitude: the man not of Africa lost in Africa, no longer with the strength or purpose to hold his own, and with less claim to anything than the ragged, half-starved old drunks from the villages who wandered about the square, eyeing the food stalls, cadging mouthfuls of beer, and the young trouble-makers from the shanty towns, a new breed, who wore shirts stamped with the Big Man’s picture and talked about foreigners and profit and, wanting only money (like Ferdinand and his friends at the lycée in the old days), came into shops and bargained aggressively for goods they didn’t want, insisting on the cost price.
From this alarm about myself—exaggerated, because it was the first—I moved to a feeling of rage against Metty, for whom the previous night I had felt such compassion. Then I remembered. It wasn’t Metty’s fault. He was at the customs, clearing the goods that had arrived by the steamer that had taken Indar and Ferdinand away, the steamer that was still one day’s sailing from the capital.
For two days, since my scrambled-eggs lunch with Yvette at her house in the Domain, the magazines with Raymond’s articles had lain in the drawer of my desk. I hadn’t looked at them. I did so now, reminded of them by thoughts of the steamer.
When I had asked Yvette to see something Raymond had written, it was only as a means of approaching her. Now there was no longer that need; and it was just as well. The articles by Raymond in the local magazines looked particularly difficult. One was a review of an American book about African inheritance laws. The other, quite long, with footnotes and tables, seemed to be a ward-by-ward analysis of tribal voting patterns in the local council elections in the big mining town in the south just before independence; some of the names of the smaller tribes I hadn’t even heard of.
The earlier articles, in the foreign magazines, seemed easier. “Riot at a Football Match,” in an American magazine, was about a race riot in the capital in the 1930s that had led to the formation of the first African political club. “Lost Liberties,” in a Belgian magazine, was about the failure of a missionary scheme, in the late nineteenth century, to buy picked slaves from the Arab slave caravans and resettle them in “liberty villages.”
These articles were a little more in my line—I was especially interested in the missionaries and the slaves. But the bright opening paragraphs were deceptive; the articles weren’t exactly shop-time, afternoon reading. I put them aside for later. And that evening, as I read in the large bed which Yvette a few hours earlier had made up, and where her smell still lingered, I was appalled.
The article about the race riot—after that bright opening paragraph which I had read in the shop—turned out to be a compilation of government decrees and quotations from newspapers. There was a lot from the newspapers; Raymond seemed to have taken them very seriously. I couldn’t get over that, because from my experience on the coast I knew that newspapers in small colonial places told a special kind of truth. They didn’t lie, but they were formal. They handled big people—businessmen, high officials, members of our legislative and executive councils—with respect. They left out a lot of important things—often essential things